Yes, RIM's Toast, But There's No Way You Flew On A 747 From Denver To San Francisco

Yesterday, we republished an article a Canadian business magazine
asked me to write arguing that Research in Motion is screwed.

(It was easy to write).

In the
article, I described my first encounter with a BlackBerry a
decade ago, which was love at first sight (see image below). The
first encounter, I explained, was on a 747 flying from Denver to
San Francisco in 1999, when a big-shot investment banker I was
flying with handed it to me.

The article went on to describe my 10-year love affair with
BlackBerries, which ended two years ago, when I
ran off with an iPhone. And it outlined why I think Research
In Motion is screwed, namely that BlackBerries are no longer the
best products on the market, smartphones are becoming a platform
game, corporations are increasingly allowing employees to choose
their own tools, and RIM's management is dismissive of the
competition and delusional about the relative strength of its own
products.

Well, I got a lot of feedback about the article. Surprisingly,
few folks took issue with the conclusion--that RIM's toast. What
they took issue with was my assertion that I had flown on a 747
from Denver to San Francisco.

The first BlackBerry model I ever
owned--which I immediately fell in love with. I accidentally
dropped it in the toilet at Eliot Spitzer's office while being
interrogated about my Wall Street research. (The screen filled
with water and short-circuited, but it still chirped when I got
emails!)

Airlines don't fly 747s from Denver to San Francisco, readers
explained--because 747s are long-haul airplanes and Denver to SFO
is short-haul. It's super-expensive to fly planes like 747s on
short-haul flights, so it's highly unlikely that airlines would
do it.

But I actually did fly a 747 from Denver to San Francisco!

It was a United flight. And here's the explanation I got when I
asked the banker I was flying with why we were on a 747.

He said that a while back, a 747 had lost power just after
takeoff from San Francisco. In an attempt to maintain control of
the plane, the pilots had almost crashed into a nearby mountain.
Later, the airline had determined that the pilots had not acted
correctly, and the airline decided that this was in part the
result of the pilots having performed so few actual takeoffs and
landings in a 747 relative to the number of hours they had flown
(because the jets were used only on long-haul flights). So the
airline decided to start using 747s on short-haul flights, to
give the 747 crews more training in takeoffs and landings.

That was the explanation I got then--and it made sense, because I
remembered hearing about the near-crash that my friend was
referring to.

But after getting questions from readers, I Googled the incident
to see whether I had hallucinated it.

(The incident, by the way, is
terrifying. The pilot screwed up, got yelled at by other
pilots, and then cleared San Bruno mountain by all of 100 feet.
Later, it was determined that that particular pilot had made only
one takeoff in a 747 in the prior year.)